Congressional pressure building on Obama as Iran talks drag out

The Obama administration's decision to send Iranian nuclear talks into overtime is triggering a backlash on Capitol Hill, as congressional Republicans warn Tehran is exploiting the situation and moving the goalposts.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called on the administration to "press pause" on the discussions, after negotiators announced they would miss the June 30 deadline and extend talks another week.
"President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry should use the opportunity to pause negotiations, take a step back and re-examine the point of the talks in the first place," McConnell wrote in an op-ed for Politico.
He and other GOP lawmakers worry the administration's negotiating position is weakening, giving more ground to the Iranians by the day.
Some also are fuming over a comment Monday by an anonymous administration official. The official was quoted suggesting international inspectors shouldn't have access to "every military site" in Iran, "because the United States of America wouldn't allow anybody to get into every military site."
This triggered accusations the administration was wrongly comparing the U.S. to Iran, and trying to hold them to the same standards.
"With the Iranian nuclear negotiations in a critical phase, this statement should alarm us all," Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a statement. "There is no place in this negotiation for moral equivalence. That thinking was wrong in the Cold War, and it is wrong today. Iran is not like any other nation, least of all the United States. Iran has a proven record of cheating on its nuclear program."  
A key disagreement between the so-called P5+1 negotiators and Iran is over how much access inspectors would have to Iranian nuclear sites, as Iranian officials try to bar inspectors from military sites. McCain and Graham, as well as McConnell, said it's imperative that inspectors have complete access.
"The standard needs to be 'go anywhere, anytime' -- not go 'some places, sometimes,'" House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said in a statement.
President Obama seemed to agree that robust inspections are critical, when he addressed the nuclear talks during a press conference on Tuesday. He told reporters he would "walk away" from negotiations if a bad deal is in the works, and cited the need for comprehensive inspections.
"The question is whether he will actually enforce this red line," McCain and Graham said.
Another lingering question is over the timeline for talks themselves.
Obama administration officials said Tuesday they were now working toward a July 7 deadline. But Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said Wednesday, "We did not set any deadline."
Congress does have some leverage. Under recently passed legislation, lawmakers would have between 30 and 60 days -- depending on when it's submitted -- to review an agreement before sanctions could be eased. With enough votes, Congress could also scuttle any sanctions relief.
Meanwhile, the head of the U.N. agency that would monitor any nuclear agreement was traveling to Tehran to meet with President Hassan Rouhani and other senior officials on Thursday.
International Atomic Energy Agency head Yukiya Amano reportedly said he wants to "accelerate the resolution of all outstanding issues related to Iran's nuclear program, including clarification of possible military dimensions."
Obama's Democratic allies on Capitol Hill are willing to give the talks more time.
"Preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is a vitally important national security priority in the Middle East and negotiating a good deal remains our best avenue to do so," Rep. Adam Smith, top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. "This is our opportunity to block all of Iran's paths to a nuclear weapon while avoiding military action.  As such, we must let the process play out."

Iran Cartoon

Bush releases trove of personal tax returns, made $7.36 million in 2013

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush made $7.36 million in 2013, according to copies of personal tax returns he released Tuesday.
The reported amount as well as income, expenses and other financial information from 33 previous years of personal tax returns was made available on his campaign website.
The former Florida governor, since first considering a run in December 2014, has attempted to make “the spirit of transparency” a central part of his campaign, including the release in February of 280,000 emails from his two terms running the state.
“Some of them were funny, some serious, some a little embarrassing,” Bush said Tuesday about the emails. “But I put them all out because I wanted people to have a window into my leadership style and be able to see for themselves how I handled the issues facing our state.
“Today’s release comes in the same spirit. … This release will show voters how I earned a living over the past three decades and how much of that living I had to give back to Uncle Sam. (Spoiler Alert: A LOT).”
The 1,150 pages of documents show Bush’s effective tax rate over the years was 36 percent and that he has received about $1.1 million per year for speeches since leaving office in 2007.
He made the least amount of money in 1987 -- $29,624.
Bush said he also released the documents to prove “we have a tax code that stifles growth and opportunity” and to make his case for a fairer tax code to “get more money back in your pocket and less in the federal kitty.”
Until now, former Senator Majority Leader Bob Dole held the record for such disclosures, having released 30 years of tax returns, but that was 20 years ago. Since then, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain R-Ariz., each released two years of tax returns, while President Obama released seven years of returns.
Such efforts also suggest an attempt by Bush to contrast himself with Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who's under fire for using a private email server and account for government communications when secretary of state from 2009 to 20013.
The release also came on the same day New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie -- under the shadow of the political-retribution scandal known as Bridgegate during his administration -- announced his 2016 White House bid.
Bush said that in 1981, after working on the Reagan-Bush presidential campaign, he and his wife moved to Miami, where he made roughly $42,000 and he became a partner in a commercial real estate venture with entrepreneur Armando Codina.
He left Codina/Bush in 1997 before becoming governor. Bush made the allotted salary while in office and reported additional income from investments. However, he declined to take the state pension -- $28,730 annually that he would have started getting this year.
After leaving the governor’s office, Bush started a new company, Jeb Bush and Associates, then joined with his son, Jeb Jr., and three other partners in establishing Britton Hill, a capital investments firm separate from the family consulting business.
Bush also was hired as a senior adviser to Barclays to advise clients on global economic issues.
From 2007-2014, Bush and his wife, Columba, donated $739,000 to charity, in addition to helping raise millions for family literacy and to find a cure for Cystic Fibrosis.

Trump files $500M lawsuit against Univision over Miss USA cancellation

Republican presidential candidate and business mogul Donald Trump filed a $500 million lawsuit against Univision Tuesday in response to the broadcaster’s decision to cut ties with him and the Miss Universe pageant over remarks he made about Mexican immigration.
The Spanish language station made the decision to terminate the contract with the Miss Universe Organization, and not to air the July 12 Miss USA contest, after comments Trump made in a June 16 campaign speech in which he said Mexico brings drug dealers, criminals and rapists into America.
Trump’s spokesman, in announcing the lawsuit, branded Univision’s move “a politically motivated attempt to suppress Mr. Trump’s freedom of speech under the First Amendment as he begins to campaign for the nation’s presidency.”
On Fox News' 'The O'Reilly Factor" Tuesday, Trump stood by his views, citing a report by Fusion (owned by Univision) that he said shows 80 percent of Central American women and girls are raped crossing into the U.S.
"I love Mexican people," Trump said. "I also respect Mexico, but Mexico is doing a tremendous number against the United States."
Trump also blasted Univision for what he said was abandoning the women involved in Miss USA, and he pledged that the show would go on.
"We have 50 of the most lovely women you have ever seen right now in Louisiana, and they have been abandoned by NBC and abandoned by Univision and I'm going to work it out so that that show goes on," Trump told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly.

Eurozone finance ministers to weigh latest Greece aid proposal

ATHENS, Greece –  Eurozone finance ministers were set to weigh Greece's latest proposal for aid Wednesday, hours after the country's international bailout expired without a deal, cutting it off from vital financing and deepening fears over whether it will be able to remain in the eurozone.
With its failure to repay the roughly 1.6 billion euros ($1.8 billion) to the International Monetary Fund, Greece became the first developed country to fall into arrears on payments to the fund. The last country to do so was Zimbabwe in 2001.
Wednesday's teleconference of eurozone finance ministers was to take place after the ministers said late Tuesday there was no way they could reach a deal to extend the bailout for Greece before the midnight deadline.
"It would be crazy to extend the program," Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who heads the eurozone finance ministers' body known as the eurogroup, said late Tuesday. "So that cannot happen and will not happen."
As Greece's leaders pushed new terms for a possible third bailout, they also struggled to cope with the consequences of shutting banks and the stock market this week.
Long lines formed as 1,000 bank branches around the country were ordered by the government to reopen Wednesday to help desperate pensioners without ATM cards cash up to 120 euros ($134) from their retirement checks. The elderly have been hit particularly hard, with tens of thousands of pensions unpaid as of Tuesday afternoon.
The expiration of the international bailout followed a tense weekend during which Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced he would put a deal proposal by Greece's international creditors to a referendum on Sunday and urged a "No" vote.
The move increased fears the country could soon fall out of the euro currency bloc and Greeks rushed to pull money out of ATMs, leading the government to shutter its banks Monday and impose restrictions on banking transactions for at least a week. Greeks are now limited to ATM withdrawals of 60 euros ($67) a day and cannot send money abroad or make international payments without special permission.
But in a surprise move late Tuesday, Deputy Prime Minister Yannis Dragasakis hinted that the government might be open to calling off the popular vote, saying it was a political decision.
The government decided on the referendum, he said on state television, "and it can make a decision on something else." It was unclear, however, how that would be possible as Parliament has already voted for the referendum to go ahead.
With its economy teetering on the brink, Greece suffered its second sovereign downgrade in as many days Tuesday when the Fitch ratings agency lowered it further into junk status, to just one notch above the level where it considers default inevitable.
The agency said the breakdown of negotiations "has significantly increased the risk that Greece will not be able to honor its debt obligations in the coming months, including bonds held by the private sector."
Fitch said it now considered a default on privately-held debt "probable."
On international markets, shares in Japan and Hong Kong rose slightly Wednesday as investors watched to see the next step after Greece fell into arrears on its payment to the IMF.
"International markets appear to have found a level where they are happy to sit and wait on the next developments in the Greek debt crisis. Greece's failure to meet the deadline on its IMF payment looks to have been fully anticipated by markets. Barring unknowns, the next critical event for markets will be the outcome of Sunday's referendum," Ric Spooner, chief market analyst at CMC Markets, said in a commentary.
Greece's financial crisis reached a critical stage after the left-wing-led Greek government, elected in January on a promise to bring an end to the hated austerity measures that it blames for an acute economic recession, failed to agree on a package of spending cuts and reforms demanded by creditors in exchange for access to the remaining 7.2 billion euros ($8.1 billion) in rescue loans.
Hopes for an 11th-hour deal were raised when the Greek side announced it had submitted a new proposal Tuesday afternoon, and the eurozone's 19 finance ministers held a teleconference to discuss it.
But those hopes were quickly dashed.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she ruled out further negotiations with Greece before Sunday's popular vote on whether to accept creditors' demands for budget reforms.
"Before the planned referendum is carried out, we will not negotiate over anything new," the dpa news agency quoted Merkel as saying.
Greece's latest offer involved a proposal to tap Europe's bailout fund — the so-called European Stability Mechanism, a pot of money set up after Greece's rescue programs to help countries in need.
Tsipras' office said the proposal was "for the full coverage of (Greece's) financing needs with the simultaneous restructuring of the debt." It did not provide details.
Dijsselbloem said the finance ministers would "study that request as we should" and that they would hold another conference call Wednesday.
Dragasakis, the Greek deputy prime minister, said the country's new proposal "narrows the differences further."
"We are making an additional effort," he said. "There are six points where this effort can be made. I don't want to get into specifics. But it includes pensions and labor issues."
European officials and Greek opposition parties have been adamant that a "No" vote on Sunday will mean Greece will leave the euro and possibly even the EU.
The government says this is scaremongering, and that a rejection of creditor demands will mean the country is in a better negotiating position.
In Athens, more than 10,000 "Yes" vote supporters gathered outside parliament despite a thunderstorm, chanting "Europe! Europe!"
Most huddled under umbrellas, including Athens resident Sofia Matthaiou.
"I don't know if we'll get a deal. But we have to press them to see reason," she said, referring to the government. "The creditors need to water down their positions too."
The protest came a day after thousands of government supporters advocating a "No" vote held a similar demonstration.
On Monday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker made a new offer to Greece. Under that proposal, Tsipras would need to accept the creditors' proposal that was on the table last weekend. He would also have to change his position on Sunday's referendum.
Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas said the offer would also involve unspecified discussions on Athens's massive debt load of over 300 billion euros, or around 180 percent of GDP. The Greek side has long called for debt relief, saying its mountainous debt is unsustainable.
A Greek government official said Tsipras had spoken earlier in the day with Juncker, European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi and European Parliament president Martin Schulz.
Meanwhile, missing the IMF payment means Greece is cut off from new loans from the organization. And with its bailout program expiring, Greece will lose access to more than 16 billion euros ($18 billion) in financial support it has not yet tapped.

Blumenthal gave diplomatic advice to Hillary Clinton as early as 2009, emails show

Controversial aide Sidney Blumenthal was sending then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton advice on sensitive diplomatic matters much earlier than previously known, even as the White House was blocking him from becoming a part of her staff, according to emails released late Tuesday by the State Department.
The emails, which make up the first in a number of document dumps of Clinton’s private email server, from which she controversially conducted official State Department business, also show that Clinton paid special interest to the attempt to hire Blumenthal.
Blumenthal served as a senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton between 1997 and 2001, but was reportedly prohibited by the Obama administration from taking a job with Clinton's State Department team.
However, in an email dated November 5, 2009, Blumenthal sent Clinton an email titled “Agenda with Merkel,” Blumenthal encouraged Clinton to develop the Transatlantic Economic Council, which he said “now languishes.” Noting that it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s major initiative when Germany held the EU Presidency in 2007, Blumenthal advised that “raising Merkel’s project and reinvigorating it would undoubtedly be well received.”
Emails previously released by the State Department and the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack showed that Blumenthal forwarded intelligence information to then-Secretary Clinton about Libya around the time of the attack that killed four Americans. Clinton then asked that his insight be circulated amongst the staff.
The 2009 email shows that Clinton was receiving advice from the controversial confidant much earlier than had been previously believed.
Additionally, a conversation between Clinton and her Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills on June 22, 2009 shows Clinton’s interest in getting Blumenthal hired. In response to an unrelated matter, Clinton writes to Mills: “Good. What is latest re: Sid Blumenthal.”
In response Mills writes “Will see – he is doing the paperwork.”
The confidant’s role with Clinton became clearer in a June 2009 email. Blumenthal passed an email along to Clinton from then-UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and spoke of her helping him with “Adams” in a meeting with Martin McGuiness of Northern Island. Adams is apparently referring to Gerry Adams.
“Shaun briefed me that Gordon will be meeting with Martin McGuiness together on Wednesday and may want your help with Adams. I said that he and Gordon should let me know before Wednesday and may want your help with Adams. I said that he and Gordon should let me know before Wednesday whether your involvement is essential and what they request.”
Blumenthal gave more of his input before Clinton's 2009 speech to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York. Blumenthal told Clinton her speech must have "a distinctive and authoritative voice."
"The speech must be crafted with a sense of real time and cannot be delivered out of sync with it," he wrote. "Slogans can become shopworm, especially those that lack analytical, historical and descriptive power."
Blumenthal also gave tips for policy on Afghanistan.
“Hillary: FYI,” the message read. “I found this one of the most sensible and informed brief articles on Afghanistan.” Patrick Cockburn, of the London Independent, is one of the best informed on-the-ground journalists. He was almost always correct on Iraq.”
In a statement late Tuesday night, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus called the latest e-mail findings "troubling."
"Administration officials knew more than previously disclosed, Sidney Blumenthal was involved with more than just providing Libya off-the-books intelligence, and State Department officials were possibly fundraising on government accounts," the statement said. "These emails however are just the tip of the iceberg and we will never get full disclosure until Hillary Clinton releases her secret server for an independent investigation."
The revelations come at an awkward time for Clinton, now a presidential candidate, who had repeatedly sought to distance herself from Blumenthal, saying his advice on Libya and other issues was “unsolicited.”
The emails, covering March through December of that year, were posted online Tuesday evening, as part of a court mandate that the agency release batches of Clinton's private correspondence from her time as secretary of state every 30 days starting June 30.
Clinton's emails have become a major issue in her early presidential campaign, as Republicans accuse her of using a private account rather than the standard government address to avoid public scrutiny of her correspondence. As the controversy has continued, Clinton has seen ratings of her character and trustworthiness drop in polling.
The monthly releases all but guarantee a slow drip of revelations from the emails throughout Clinton's primary campaign, complicating her efforts to put the issue to rest. The goal is for the department to publicly unveil 55,000 pages of her emails by Jan. 29, 2016 -- just three days before Iowa caucus-goers will cast the first votes in the Democratic primary contest. Clinton has said she wants the department to release the emails as soon as possible.
"There's been nothing but nearly nonstop work on this" since the last group of emails was released, State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday at briefing in which he acknowledged the inconvenient timing. "You have to understand the enormity of the task here. It is a lot of stuff to go through."
Clinton turned her emails over to the State Department last year, nearly two years after leaving the Obama administration. She has said she got rid of about 30,000 emails she deemed exclusively personal. Only she and perhaps a small circle of advisers know the content of the discarded communications.
Though Clinton has said her home system included "numerous safeguards," it's not clear if it used encryption software to communicate securely with government email services. That would have protected her communications from the prying eyes of foreign spies or hackers.
Separately, the State Department on Tuesday provided more than 3,600 pages of documents to the Republican-led House committee investigating the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, including emails of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time, and former Clinton aides Mills and Jake Sullivan.
In a letter to the committee, the department said "to the extent the materials produced relate to your inquiry, we do not believe they change the fundamental facts of the attacks on Benghazi."
Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in the assaults on the diplomatic facility in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. Several investigations have faulted security at the facility, but found that the CIA and military acted properly in responding. One Republican-led House probe asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration officials in its report last year.
The House committee will hold a public business meeting next week to vote on whether to release the transcript of Blumenthal's deposition. Blumenthal testified behind closed doors for more than eight hours earlier this month, and Democrats have been pressing the panel to release the full transcript.

What the Cartoon

Texas AG says clerks can cite religious objections on gay marriage, most states complying with ruling

The top law enforcement official in Texas said county clerks can cite religious objections in denying marriage licenses for gay couples -- though the Lone Star State and others have for the most part started complying with Friday’s Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.
Despite initial resistance in several of the 14 states that did not previously allow same-sex marriage, top officials in those states by Monday said they planned to comply. Among them were officials in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Even staunch conservative critics acknowledge states will have to, in the near-term, follow the court ruling.
But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, released a statement suggesting the next battle over gay marriage may be over how to balance that ruling with First Amendment religious freedoms. He predicted clerks and others could be at the center of it.
“[T]he United States Supreme Court again ignored the text and spirit of the Constitution to manufacture a right that simply does not exist,” he said in a statement released late Sunday. “… Importantly, the reach of the Court’s opinion stops at the door of the First Amendment and our laws protecting religious liberty.”
He warned that any clerk, justice of the peace or other administrator who declines to issue a license to a same-sex couple could face litigation or a fine.
But in the nonbinding legal opinion requested by Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Paxton said "numerous lawyers" stand ready to defend, free of charge, any public official refusing to grant one. And Paxton said he would do “everything I can from this office to be a public voice” for them.
In its 5-4 opinion Friday, the Supreme Court did nothing to eliminate rights of religious liberty, Paxton's opinion states.
Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director for the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, agreed that the religious rights issue is the next thorny issue to resolve.
“The biggest question that was left in limbo is the next big challenge: how to balance these new-found constitutional rights and a long-standing and explicit right to exercise religion. That’ll be the next battleground,” she said.
Accepting the Supreme Court’s basic decision may be less of an issue. While several states initially slow-walked their compliance with the ruling, that resistance appears to be melting. Severino said she doesn’t expect further lawsuits challenging the ruling itself.
“If a state did attempt to challenge this decision, they would simply be struck down by the federal court that has jurisdiction over the state. It would be a beyond uphill battle. Federal courts are directly controlled by this decision,” she said.
The Supreme Court technically gave the losing side roughly three weeks to ask for reconsideration. And for the ruling to technically take effect in most states, the circuit courts will have to adopt the ruling, in turn sending an order to state agencies, which will be told to hand out the marriage licenses.
Immediately after Friday’s ruling, some states said they would wait, even as clerks in counties scattered across the country began issuing licenses.
In Mississippi, Attorney General Jim Hood initially said they would wait until the applicable circuit court lifted a stay on a prior order before issuing same-sex marriage licenses.
The Clarion-Ledger reported Monday that the same office has since sent a letter allowing circuit clerks to issue the licenses.
The letter reportedly said Friday’s ruling is now “the law of the land.”
Likewise, a parish in Louisiana reportedly has started to issue licenses after officials there resisting doing so on Friday.
Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican presidential candidate, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that they, too, were waiting for the circuit court to reverse a prior ruling.
But, he acknowledged, “We have got no choice to comply, even though I think … this decision was the wrong one.”